One of my favourite songs by gospel icon Sfiso Ncwane is entitled Kulungile Baba. You may know it? It’s a firm fan favourite. But as I walked into the Grace Bible Church in Soweto on Friday morning, the words of the song stirred deep inside my heart.

Researchers in Australia have provided the final piece of a puzzle to develop a new anti-malarial drug, which targets the parasite that causes the disease and kills it with a salt overdose.

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The drug, the first
discovery in the fight against malaria in two decades, holds out fresh hope for
conquering the disease, which claims hundreds of thousands of lives a year and
is known for its evolving drug resistance.

The malaria
parasite, carried to humans by mosquitoes, lives in red blood cells, which are
full of salt. To survive, researchers knew it had to have a way of filtering
salt out of its body.

“The parasite is
quite leaky, it’s letting salt in all the time. But that doesn’t matter because
it’s got a very effective molecular salt pump that keeps pushing the salt out
again,” said Professor Kiaran Kirk, director at the Research School of Biology
at Australia National University (ANU).

Research teams in
the United States and Singapore had
developed a drug that attacked the protein that makes up the salt pump, but it
wasn’t until the ANU researchers tested it that they confirmed it worked
effectively.

“On the one hand,
they had a brand new drug, they didn’t know how it worked,” Kirk said.

“We knew a lot about
salt and salt pumps, and it was clear their drug was knocking out our salt
pump. That led us to work together.”

The drug attacks the
salt pump and disables it, causing the parasite to fill up with salt and die.
Targeting such a basic function is crucial because malaria tends to evolve
quickly, rendering other drugs ineffective.

Other drugs that
combat malaria combine or package older drugs together or are altered
chemically.

“This is actually
the first drug for 20 years to be genuinely new,” Kirk said. “Targeting
the pump protein is a structure that has never been used before to treat
malaria.”

The drug is
undergoing clinical trials and it will be several years at least before it hits
the market. The other two groups involved are the Novartis Institutes for
Tropical Disease in Singapore
and the Genomics Institute of the Novartis research Foundation.

Malaria infects more
than 200 million people worldwide every year and kills around 600 000 of
them — primarily children under the age of five in sub-Saharan Africa.

Experts say one of
the most challenging features of this parasite is its ability to evolve and
overcome anti-malarial drugs — a factor that is undermining global work towards
eradicating the killer disease.